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4 B. BOSANQUBT : But the wise application of such an impartial theory to problems which tend to become isolated in their dignity has very great advantages. The mere fact signalised above, that for Sociology the State ceases to be the sole form of social unity, is typical of these advantages. For the State is nothing but an expression of certain needs and aspirations of mankind ; it is itself capable of many degrees of existence, and if it is the highest revelation of social unity it can only be known as such when duly correlated with all others. A. general or indifferent theory is a solvent which destroys the rigid limitations of traditional thought and sets us free to contemplate the unity of life in its continuous endeavour after self-expression. Whether the impartiality or indifference which has hitherto characterised Sociological analysis is really essential to it appears to depend on the question whether the general laws of social behaviour differ in kind or only in degree from the characteristics which give interest to the object matter of political, historical, ethical and religious philosophy. The point of view taken by M. Bernes 1 seems to recognise a double tendency in the body of science, such that the purely speculative or, in our language, the indifferent nature of mathematics finds its complement at the other extreme of the series in what for him is the practical spirit of Sociology ; the intermediate group of the " natural " sciences being, as I understand him, the chief meeting- ground of these two tendencies, neither of which can be wholly absent in any scientific endeavour. It is a detail of terminology that M. Bernes' phrase "practical" seems to me to approach in actual significance the philo- sophical expression "speculative". It means, as I read him, not the spirit of an art devoted to immediate action, but rather the spirit of a philosophy which divines, through the will no less than through the intellect, the impulse and the indications of a partially unrealised unity in the world, which demands realisation. If Sociology admits to itself the scientific validity of such an impulse and the demands of such a unity, and applies itself to the discovery of laws and forms which shall be capable of doing justice to this re- cognition in the comparative treatment of social aggregates and functions, then the course which it has hitherto pursued will have been considerably modified, and the distinction which separated it from Philosophy will in all essentials have been done away. 1 Revue de Morale et de Metaphysique, March, 1895.